Public and private statements by administration officials have convinced leaders of the organized Jewish community to refrain from actively opposing the report, produced by a bipartisan panel co-chaired by former secretary of state James Baker, a Republican, and ex-congressman Lee Hamilton, a Democrat.

"All we are hearing," said an official at one major Jewish agency, "is that Bush has no plans to shift his Middle East policy and that he will choose not to adopt the recommendations in the Baker report that have to do with that."

President Bush is expected to conclude his consultations on a new Iraq policy in the next week and to announce his decisions by year's end. The administration has made it clear that the Iraq Study Group's recommendations will be only one source of guidance.

The part of the report that most angered pro-Israel activists was the attempt to link a solution in Iraq to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "The situation in Iraq is linked with events in the region," the report reads. "Several Iraqi, U.S., and international officials commented to us that Iraqi opposition to the United States - and support for [Shi'ite radical Moqtada] Sadr - spiked in the aftermath of Israel's bombing campaign in Lebanon." Events in Syria, Iran and Afghanistan are also cited as bearing on Iraq.

The report calls for an American and international effort to solve the Israeli-Arab conflict, based on U.N. resolutions 242 and 338 and on Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Baker and Hamilton also recommend that America engage with Syria and Iran to solve the regional problems regarding Iraq.

In a December 7 conference call of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, leaders of most groups voiced reservations over this part of the Iraq Study Group report and called for action to block any Israel-Iraq linkage. Israel's consul general in New York, Arye Mekel, who took part in the discussion, reportedly said that while Israel will not try to intervene in an American decision-making process, it hopes to make clear that the two disputes are unrelated. Mekel, according to several participants, portrayed the report as negative from Israel's standpoint and said that Baker is responsible for the report's language on Israel. Other participants, including Aipac executive director Howard Kohr, stressed the importance of ensuring that the recommendations seen as linking Israel and Iraq are not adopted.

The only dissenting voice in the call was that of Seymour Reich, president of the Israel Policy Forum, who said the Jewish community should not lose sight of the need to support peace efforts in the Middle East. "I'm against any linkage," Reich later told the Forward, "but at the same time it's important to open every door that can lead to negotiations with the Palestinians."

Numerous Jewish groups issued statements last week opposing the Baker-Hamilton report. The Anti-Defamation League accused the study group of falling "into the traps of inappropriately linking stability in Iraq to a solution of the Arab-Israeli conflict." The American Jewish Committee called the report's call for a new diplomatic offensive "old thinking" based on unsuccessful diplomatic efforts. The Zionist Organization of America said the report's recommendations would "cripple the war on Islamist terror."

Aipac refrained from directly questioning the report, but issued a statement detailing Iran's actions in the region and calling Iran the major source of instability.

The only group openly supporting the report was Americans for Peace Now, which called on Bush to adopt the recommendations in full. "It is gratifying that a bipartisan panel, comprised of seasoned policy experts, has reached conclusions that should have intuitively been adopted by this administration long ago," said Debra DeLee, the group's president.

While criticizing recommendations in the report dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, most Jewish leaders refrained from dismissing the report altogether. "Anything we do about this report should be sensitive to the entire report and to its recommendations, which are basically good," said Rabbi Steven Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. He added that the Jewish community should "be wise in the way it responds."

The president of the Arab American Institute, James Zogby, called the Jewish organizations' response a "knee jerk reaction," saying that America needs to restore its credibility in the Arab world. "It is possible to go on with a 'U.S. and Israel against the world' policy, but then Iraq will disintegrate and Iran will take over. Will Israel be stronger then?"

Israeli officials took a cautious approach. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called on his ministers to avoid commenting, calling it an internal American issue. At the same time, Olmert said he had no reason to believe the administration would change its attitude toward Syria or Iran.

In private conversations, Israeli officials expressed outrage over the report, arguing that the committee - while interviewing eight Arab ambassadors and many other Arab officials, spoke only to one Israeli, Ephraim Sneh. He is described in the report as deputy defense minister, though when interviewed he was only a member of Knesset.

In sum, McCain is a disaster waiting to happen.

In 1990-1991 I had the great privilege to meet and ultimately befriend retired Air Force Colonel Ted Guy. Ted had been a POW in Vietnam for over six years - after being shot down and captured in Laos and driven on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to Hanoi.

Ted became famous as the war ended as he tried to bring changes against several of his fellow U.S. POWs who he thought had cooperated with the North Vietnamese while in captivity; after coming home in 1973 his superiors decided not to press charges. But Ted was forever branded a "real hard ass" because of this incident.

For a while Ted was the Senior Ranking Officer (SRO) in - I believe - The Plantation (a POW camp on the outskirts of Hanoi) in which John McCain was also being held.

The SRO kept the chain of military order among the POWs; they took orders from him and kept discipline that way.

When I got to know Ted Guy, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on POWs was being organized; McCain was named a member. Ted Guy's thoughts about McCain? "John was a good troop in camp."

Ted Guy - since repatriation in 1973 - had discounted any chance that living U.S. POWs were left behind in Vietnam after the January 27, 1973 Paris Peace Agreements.

In fact, by his own admission, Ted often became gruff with MIA family members who asked him if their loved one might have been left behind in captivity. "I told them there was no chance and they needed to get a life."

This was the same message many of the former POWs were delivering to relatives of the thousands of men who did not come home in Operation Homecoming: "Forget it ... we are the only living men ... give it up and move on with your lives." Of course, that was easy for them to say: they had come home!

The U.S. Government never officially briefed the returning POWs about the egregious violations of the Paris Peace Accords - by both Hanoi and Washington DC.

Washington refused to pay the $4.25 billion President Nixon secretly promised in a February 1, 1973 letter to Premier Pham Van Dong - and kept hidden from the Congress for three years; Hanoi failed to release the other group of 600 U.S. POWs they were holding as an insurance policy against these funds.

If the truth had been told to our returning heros, they would probably have led the charge for the return of their comrades; but they were not told. Instead they were sent out to America's heartland as the war heros we so desperately needed - McCain and Ted Guy included.

Except that Ted Guy read all the new revelations that began surfacing in the 1980's; by 1991 he had seen enough. "I was lied to," he told me. "I am now certain we knowingly left men behind in captivity."

Ted also got a fellow former POW, Terry Uyeyama, to join our little 'group' as we went around DC trying to get the U.S. Government to reverse policy and negotiate for the living men still being held in Vietnam and Laos.

Then McCain entered the picture.

As the Senate Committee heated up - and more and more new information surfaced showing that indeed we did leave men behind held against their will in Vietnam and Laos - McCain began a long and vicious campaign to discredit and shoot down any new information or anyone advocating that the truth about our POWs be made public. Thus emerged for many to see the mean and ugly side of John McCain.

Ted Guy, his old Senior Ranking Officer and friend and admirer, soon changed his mind about McCain and questioned the truthfulness and emotional stability of his former POW veteran.

Sadly, Ted Guy died of leukemia 7 years ago. A healthy Ted Guy today could have and would have stood up and told the truth about John McCain - and had the former-POW status to take McCain on.

McCain these days goes unchecked. Ron Kessler has opened the topic of McCain's dangerous temper to further public scrutiny.

In sum, John McCain is not the man for the presidency. Yes, he would beat Hillary one on one. And we can't have her either.

But before everyone rushes to sign up for McCain's campaign, let's take a break and learn more about McCain the man and his character.

Once you get to know this man, you will agree: he must be defeated by a real Reagan conservative for the GOP nomination.

Anti-poverty campaigners reacted angrily to the findings. 'Aid should go to the people who need it, not as a political sweetener,' said Duncan Green of Oxfam. 'In recent years most rich countries have been making progress on this, but showering bribes on developing countries just because they sit on the UN security council is clearly a step backwards.'

Charities often complain that the US uses its aid as a political tool, and this new evidence of what the authors call 'vote-buying' will raise fears about whether the surge of aid money that was promised at last year's Gleneagles G8 summit will be fairly spent.

Ten of the 15 seats on the security council are filled for two years at a time, by rotation. Kuziemko and Werker found that, in years when they have a seat, countries get an average of more than £8m extra in foreign aid from the US.

'I don't think it's surprising this goes on; but I wonder whether countries being aware that it goes on might have some salutary effect,' Kuziemko said.

Countries with a security council seat also receive an average of £500m extra from the UN itself, most of it channelled through its children's fund, Unicef, over which the US traditionally has been able to exert control. President George Bush recently provoked controversy by appointing a close political ally, former Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, as Unicef's chief.

When there is a controversial vote in prospect, the premium for countries with a security council seat is even higher. US aid surges by as much as 170 per cent, bringing in a £23m windfall, while the UN spends an extra £4m.

'Some countries serve on the security council during relatively calm years, whereas others, by chance, are fortunate enough to serve during a year in which a key resolution is debated and their vote becomes more valuable,' the authors say. They highlight controversial resolutions over issues including the Korean War, Suez, the Falklands and Kosovo - though the period they study does not include the notorious 'second resolution' over the invasion of Iraq, which never came to a vote.

David Woodward, of the New Economics Foundation, who is writing about the paper for a forthcoming edition of the Lancet, said the findings suggest the UN should be radically reformed.

'As long as one country wields such influence, there will always have a degree of control over what goes on, and they will be likely to abuse that.'

'The biggest obstacle, in both the IMF and the World Bank, as well as the UN, is that the countries that now have power can use that power to block reform - and they do.'

Town Republicans say they still strongly support the president and call him a principled man, but acknowledge they have reservations about his handling of the war, government spending, immigration and his choice of advisers.

"On balance, I think President Bush will go down as courageous and valiant, a fine man who, unfortunately, may have been blindsided by the family tradition of loyalty," Russell Reynolds Jr. told the Greenwich Time newspaper.

Reynolds, who says he is a close friend of the Bush family, was a key figure in former President Bush's 1988 White House run and is a founder of an executive search firm.

"There's nobody who's not disappointed in the overall situation," he said.

Reynolds said that while Bush is a man of character and integrity who has led successful homeland security efforts since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the president has not lived up to expectations on issues including Social Security reform and addressing the federal budget deficit.

Greenwich residents' feelings about the president mirror those around the country, said E. Pendleton James, a former aide to President Reagan who lives in town.

"That's just not Greenwich, but it's Peoria, Ill., and Abilene, Texas," James said.

James said he and other Republicans believe there is a need for the president to rework the strategy in Iraq.

"There's obviously a lot of concern and anxiety about the course of the foreign policy as directed through the Middle East," James said. "We all know a change of course is needed. I want to see him solve this problem."

John Raben, chairman of the Greenwich GOP, said other factors should be considered when it comes to Bush's legacy.

"Look, any presidency in the last two years of a second term loses some momentum," Raben said. "The combination of the last-two-year syndrome and the situation in Iraq has clearly stalled the momentum."

Other Republicans defended the president, noting that he has protected the country from another terrorist attack.

"I feel very positively towards the president of the United States. I think he's done a very good job under the most trying circumstances that anyone can imagine," said Edward Dadakis, a former town GOP chairman and Bush's local campaign coordinator during the 2000 election.

Malcolm Pray Jr., a retired auto magnate who has donated generously to Bush's campaigns, said putting a positive spin on the president's handling of Iraq is not easy.

"How can you be happy?" Pray said. "I don't want to defend it, but I'm not criticizing. We all know there have been a lot of mistakes made."

Having invaded Iraq and brought down its government including its security infrastructure, the U.S. is now completely clueless as to how to put Iraq back together and get out. President Bush insists that American troops will stay in Iraq until "the job is done" - whatever that means.

The trouble is, Bush has lost this utterly pointless war but doesn't want to face reality. More to the point, he doesn't want to admit he desperately needs outside help to fix it.

A belated attempt by his father Bush Senior to help the bewildered President - by roping in former secretary of state James Baker, is being resisted by the White House. Bush's response to the recommendations by the panel chaired by Baker and Lee Hamilton has been truly astounding. Instead of being grateful for the timely help, the President argues that he can't accept all recommendations of the bipartisan committee. It's this unreasonable and unhelpful attitude that is at the heart of the unholy mess in Iraq and the never-ending woes of the Iraqi people. Clearly, the president's king-sized ego makes it difficult for him to see the writing on the wall, even if it means the loss of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.

Again it is this rigid mindset of the administration that has exacerbated the situation in the Palestinian Territories. By refusing to deal with the freely-and-fairly elected representatives of the Palestinian people, Washington has added to the woes of these besieged people. Instead of opposing Israel's persecution and financial boycott of the impoverished Palestinians, the Administration has imposed its own financial constraints on the Palestinian government and its institutions. As a result, an unprecedented humanitarian disaster has enveloped the occupied territories, with Palestinians struggling to survive. Next door in Lebanon, Israel's aggression has created a serious political crisis threatening the country with another civil war.

In fact, as James Baker argued in his report, the crises in Iraq and Lebanon are more-or-less directly linked to the Palestine-Israel conflict. Peace in Palestine is still the key to a peaceful Middle East.

This work of political fiction, based on rigorous research and backed up by a critical eye to detail, is presented as the journal of a young French diplomat, who describes events as they unfold day by day: the wave of isolationism that overcomes American public opinion during the 2008 presidential campaign; the success of the slogan, "Let's bring the boys home," taken up by all candidates for the White House; the loss of influence by the neo-conservatives in the Republican Party; the adoption by the Congress of a law drastically limiting the use of American troops abroad, thereby binding the hands of the President, as was the case at the end of the Vietnam War as a reaction to the excessive executive power that prevailed from Roosevelt to Nixon.

The American disengagement from Iraq and Afghanistan brings the Islamists to power in Baghdad and the return of the Taliban in Kabul. Deprived of unconditional support from Washington, the traditional allies of the United States - Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan - discredited and without popular support, pass in their turn under the sway of the Islamists. For fear of anarchy in these three countries, the middle class is resigned to support the new regime, while intellectuals seek at all costs to reach Europe. So quick to judge America as too interventionist, the Old Continent discovers to its distress that the U.S. withdrawal makes Europe vulnerable and impotent. With Paris in the lead, European governments offer a slew of concessions to the Islamists regimes in the hopes of avoiding attack - in vain - and then endeavors to disguise their weakness. Israel prepares for war.

Antoine Vitkine's intention is not to needlessly instill fear. The scenario that he describes is often discussed by international affairs specialists. His assumptions appear to be regularly supported by current events. But faithful to the saying "a good drawing is better than a long speech," the author chose to relate a history through his characters - the diplomat and his colleagues, the foreign minister, the French journalist, the Arab intellectual - rather than impose a burdensome expose on the reader.

The author exhibits an excellent literary style, as one reads with passion about the adventures of these men and women struggling with what James Joyce called "the nightmare of history." The Temptation of Defeat tells us where the love of ease and comfort can carry advanced democracies, which would like to believe that war will never be their concern again. Whether one shares the pessimism or not, the reading of this book is a must.

The Temptation of Defeat [La Tentation de la défaite] (available through Editions de la Martinière/Doc), 271 pages, 18 euros.

Many of the drug-running recruiters remained on the job, with continued access to local schools, for months - and often, years - after FBI agents secretly filmed them counting cash next to stacks of cocaine bricks, the Arizona Daily Star found in a months-long probe of court records and military employment data.

Some were still recruiting three years after they first were caught on camera running drugs in uniform. Most have pleaded guilty and are to be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military.

There is no suggestion in court records that the recruiters were providing drugs to students.

What they did between FBI drug runs isn't known because they weren't under constant surveillance, the FBI said. For example, in the middle of the cocaine sting, one of the recruiters was arrested by another law-enforcement agency in an unrelated drug case, accused of transporting nearly 200 pounds of marijuana on Interstate 19, court records show.

Military recruiting officials say the corruption was not widespread. They also say they kept these recruiters on the job because they either didn't know they were under investigation, or were told by the FBI to leave the suspects alone so as not to jeopardize the sting's outcome.

Some Tucson parents and school officials, contacted by the Star about the results of the paper's research, said students should not have been left exposed for so long to recruiters known by the FBI to be involved in cocaine-running.

"I don't like the thought of someone involved with drugs having access to my child, and I don't know anything about it and the school doesn't know anything about it," said Kathy Janssen, who has a 15-year-old son at Tucson High Magnet School, the city's largest high school. "High school students are very vulnerable."

This isn't the first time the FBI has come under criticism in the Lively Green case. Allegations of sexual misconduct by undercover informants also have dogged the case and could result in reduced punishment for the recruiters and dozens of other defendants.

SCHOOLS

At a press conference to unveil the case last year, the FBI announced that many Lively Green defendants were military members. Agents didn't say that recruiters were involved.

A Phoenix-based FBI spokeswoman said the agency can't say much at this point about the Lively Green probe because it's still in progress.

Special Agent Deb McCarley did say the FBI generally performs risk assessments before deciding to keep suspects who work in public positions on the job during undercover probes.

"We recognize the range of ethical issues that inherently arise in the course of our undercover investigations," McCarley said in an e-mail.

"We have sound policies in place" to address such dilemmas, she said, and "this case has been no exception."

Some high schools in Tucson Unified, Flowing Wells Unified and Marana Unified school districts, and in Amphitheater Public Schools, were visited by one or more of these recruiters on a regular or occasional basis, according to military recruiting officials. Schools in other districts may have had visits as well, but precise records no longer are available in some cases, officials said.

One TUSD Governing Board member was incensed to hear the recruiters remained on the job so long.

"It's ludicrous to me that the FBI would leave these people in place and allow them onto our high school campuses," Judy Burns said.

"If they were going to do that, they should have been monitoring them constantly."

Monica Young, who has two children attending TUSD high schools, agreed.

"It is appalling that recruiters who were known to be involved in such activity were allowed on any school campus," she said.

Legal expert Stephen Saltzburg, who teaches criminal procedure at George Washington University, said it's entirely possible that the Tucson recruiters were running drugs in their free time and still functioning normally on the job.

Once the FBI made the decision to leave them in place at local schools "one would hope they would be watching that very carefully," he said.

ETHICS

From a military standpoint, it's especially egregious that recruiters took part in the cocaine runs, experts say.

"The military definitely views recruiters as persons in a special position of trust," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, in Washington, D.C.

Recruiters are supposed to meet high standards to promote an honorable image of the military, Fidell said. If court-martialed, they probably would be punished more harshly than non-recruiters, he said.

The willingness of Tucson recruiters to run drugs was clear to FBI agents from the start of the Lively Green sting, according to agent testimony at the court-martial of a Davis-Monthan technical sergeant - a non-recruiter - convicted in the Lively Green case in June.

In fact, it was a recruiter who caused the FBI to set up the sting in the first place, FBI Special Agent Adam Radtke said.

That recruiter, Radtke said, was former Army National Guardsman Darius W. Perry, who pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court.

Radtke said the sting got started in late 2001, when the FBI received numerous complaints that Perry, who worked out of the Guard's East Side recruiting office, was taking bribes to fix the military aptitude test scores of new recruits.

The FBI put an undercover informant in place to check it out. As the FBI plant was paying Perry to fix a test score in the parking lot of a Tucson restaurant, Perry opened the trunk of his recruiting vehicle and offered to sell part of a kilo of cocaine, Radtke said.

"Perry basically introduced the crime to us," the agent testified.

Perry couldn't be reached for comment. His federal court file, including the name of his attorney, has been sealed by the court. The Arizona Daily Star has filed a legal motion to have the case unsealed, and the action is pending.

Perry, 42, and another former Army National Guard recruiter, Mark A. Fillman, 56, were the first to offer their drug-running services to undercover informants who posed as Mexican drug lords during the sting, Radtke said.

The sting was set up so participants could make money in two ways - by agreeing to help transport cocaine and by finding others to do so.

The Tucson recruiters, trained to sell people on the military, often used those skills to recruit for the drug ring, helping the sting to mushroom, court records show.
One Army recruiter, Rodney E. Mills, 40, brought in six people. Perry persuaded six others, all Army National Guard members, to join, his plea deal said.

In one case not mentioned in the plea agreement, Perry is said to have recruited a Nogales woman named Leslie Hildago, then in her early 20s, to join the drug ring after he had recruited her to join the National Guard.

Hildago's lawyer, Richard Bacal of Tucson, said he is "not going to deny" that's what took place, but said he can't elaborate because of the plea bargain Hildago signed.

If recruiters used data from recruiting rolls to solicit people for drug running, that's particularly offensive, said military law expert Scott Silliman, a former senior lawyer for the Air Force who now is a law professor at Duke University.

Such recruiters "took advantage of their positions to commit crime," Silliman said.

Another Tucson recruiter, former National Guard member Demian F. Castillo, 35, got his own younger brother - John M. Castillo, 31, - to join the drug ring, court records show.

The younger Castillo, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection port inspector, agreed to wave through two vehicles he believed were loaded with cocaine at the Mariposa Port of Entry in Nogales, in exchange for $19,000. He, too, pleaded guilty.

PROSECUTION

Of the more than 60 Lively Green defendants who have pleaded guilty so far, 10 were Tucson military recruiters. Between the 10, they pocketed a total of $180,600 in bribe payments, court records show.

Five worked at the Army's Midtown recruiting office: Mills, Sheldon L. Anderson, 27; Derreck J. Curry, 30; Ronricco M. Allen, 36; and Jason E. Kitzmiller, 27.

Two Marine recruiters whose office was next door to the Army recruiters also pleaded guilty: James M. Clear, 26, and Jared A. Wright, 28.

National Guard recruiters who pleaded guilty include Perry, Fillman and Castillo. A fourth National Guard recruiter, Raul F. Portillo, 34, was identified by the FBI as a suspect but was never charged. Portillo is the recruiter arrested during the FBI sting by another police agency on marijuana trafficking charges. He is believed to have fled to Mexico.

In May, Perry retired honorably from the military, six months before the FBI arrested him. Fillman also retired honorably in May 2003, two years before he was charged.

In two cases, the Arizona Army National Guard gave suspected or convicted recruiters general discharges under "honorable" conditions.

One went to Castillo, the recruiter who brought his brother into the drug ring.

The lawyer for the Arizona Army National Guard, Col. Richard Palmatier, said Castillo resigned from the Guard a day before his guilty plea, which kept his personnel file free of information about the crime.

Portillo, the former recruiter believed to be in Mexico, also received a general discharge under honorable conditions, even though he was wanted in Santa Cruz County - and still is - on the unrelated drug charges. Palmatier said Guard officials didn't know about those charges, and even if they had, Portillo wasn't convicted so the case couldn't be used against him upon discharge.

Portillo was stopped on northbound I-19 in a vehicle filled with pot in July 2003, and is thought to have left the country to escape prosecution, said Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva. Portillo couldn't be reached for comment.

Silva was astonished to hear the National Guard gave Portillo a military discharge that includes the word "honorable."

"That is shocking. It's absolutely amazing," he said.

WHAT NOW

What happens next with the recruiters and other Lively Green defendants is in the court's hands.

Each defendant who pleaded guilty faces the possibility of up to five years in prison. But all have signed plea bargains that say their sentences will be determined by their willingness to cooperate with prosecutors and testify against others, if needed.

In their plea deals, none of the defendants was charged with drug trafficking, which has higher potential penalties. Instead, they were charged with bribery, conspiracy and extortion for the cash they accepted.

How much prison time they get - if any - also may be influenced by the allegations of misconduct that have surfaced in the Lively Green probe.

The complete extent of misconduct has never been publicly revealed, but according to witness testimony at the D-M court-martial in June, there was an incident in October 2002 in which informants posing as drug dealers hired hookers after a drug run to a Las Vegas hotel.

The FBI informant paid the prostitutes to have sex with several men who later became defendants, witnesses said.
At one point, they said, a prostitute who was drunk and high appeared to pass out and one of the FBI informants performed lewd acts over the woman's face while someone else took photographs.

The informant involved later destroyed the photos, said the defense lawyer in the D-M court-martial case.

A Tucson lawyer and former federal prosecutor said it's "absolutely probable" that Lively Green defendants will get a break on their sentences because of the misconduct.

"Any time you have credible allegations of misconduct, it is going to impact the resolution of a case," said A. Bates Butler III, who prosecuted drug cases and other federal cases from 1977 to 1981 as U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona.

"Jurors don't like misconduct," Bates said, so prosecutors sometimes will try to salvage such cases by offering plea deals to lesser charges so the cases don't get to trial.

Military recruiting officials said they removed the corrupt recruiters once they learned of the crimes, or when they got the go-ahead from the FBI to do so.

"We suspended the soldiers from recruiting duties as soon as we were notified of their involvement," which often was the same day they pleaded guilty, said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky.
Military officials say the criminal acts of Tucson's recruiters are regrettable but not the norm.

"Allegations of recruiter misconduct are rare," considering the thousands of recruiters on the job nationwide, said Janice Hagar, a Marine Corps recruiting spokeswoman. "This was an isolated incident."

The decision follows the state's 2005 execution in which guards failed to connect a back-up intravenous line to Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the former Crips gang leader who garnered global publicity after writing anti-gang books.

Then on Wednesday Florida executioners botched the insertion of needles into condemned killer Angel Diaz, which meant lethal chemicals did not go directly into his veins, according to the state's medical examiner.

Florida's incoming governor, Charlie Crist, responded on Friday by saying he would halt executions until a commission investigated the state's procedures.

Death penalty opponents have for years argued that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution, but only such recent instances have given legal and political traction to their arguments.

"When properly administered, lethal injection results in a death that is far kinder than that suffered by the victims of capital crimes," said Fogel, who earlier this year visited the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco.

"At the present time, however, defendants' implementation of California's lethal-injection protocol lacks both reliability and transparency," he wrote.

"In light of the substantial questions raised by the records of previous executions, defendants' actions and failures to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an Eighth Amendment violation. This is intolerable under the Constitution."

Lethal injection is used in 37 U.S. states, but legal challenges have delayed such executions this year in not only California and Florida, the first and fourth most populous states, but several others including New Jersey and Ohio.

The United States has executed 53 people in 2006, a 10-year low, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

THREE-DRUG DOSE

California has long executed its worst criminals. Its famous San Quentin prison hanged the condemned starting in 1893; the state turned to lethal gas in 1938. It turned to lethal injection in 1994 after a federal judge found gassing cruel and unusual.

Florida lawmakers voted to switch to lethal injection in 2000 after a series of bungled executions using the state's electric chair, including one where flames shot from a prisoner's head.

Executioners now typically attach two intravenous lines to condemned U.S. inmates, one tube acting as a backup to assure a continuous flow of the three chemicals that anesthetize, paralyze and then kill.

In the Williams execution, prison guards struggled for 25 minutes to insert the intravenous lines and it took another 10 minutes for the lethal drugs to take effect, said Barbara Becnel, a witness to the execution and co-author of Williams' anti-gang books.

Journalists at several recent California executions have seen guards struggle to insert the IV lines to the condemned killer.

Witnesses in Florida this week said Diaz appeared to grimace and gasp for breath in what was supposed to be a quick but painless procedure. Prison officials had to give Diaz the drugs twice and it took him 34 minutes to die from the start of the execution.

"The court I think correctly recognized that there are severe flaws in the system," said Richard Steinken, a Chicago attorney who has worked with Death Row inmate Michael Morales, whose case sparked Judge Fogel's decision on Friday. "Whether it can be fixed remains to be seen."